What the Cormorant’s Toll Brought In, and What Has No Column Yet

Arrived: the Cormorant’s Toll, up from Serevan, before the second bell, four days behind a normal crossing — her master blames the wind and nothing else, and I believe him; a ship with something actually wrong with her does not ask after a return cargo before she is even cleared. She carried indigo, dried citrus, a small consignment of spiced silk, and put all of it ashore dry, onto a quay that was, for the first time in a week, dry itself.

Indigo, Serevan-grade: seventeen marks eight drams the weight, down against last week’s stand — the Cormorant’s cargo alone accounts for the softening. Three buyers took it before noon, Dye Lane among them, and I expect the third basin will be busy again by Firstday. Fine leather, Oru: six marks three the hide, up, and it will stay up — no ship expected from Oru before Harvestmonth, and a thin stock does not care what the weather does in the meantime. Wool held steady at four marks four. Grain eased a tenth day running. None of it required the flood to finish before it could be entered. The harbor does not wait on the Archive’s accounting to reopen its own.

Marginal note. The Weighing Hall stood the advisory down this morning for the Wharfside and the lower Guild Row — only the Archive Steps remain under caution. Corvus has given himself thirty-six days to close his count of what the water took; my ledger closes the day the ship returns, and asks no extension of the season for it. I noted this with more satisfaction than it deserved, until I read what Vera entered against a wage claim that was never, underneath, about the wage — a father, a season, a debt that discharged itself the moment it was spoken aloud in a room that keeps records. I have been carrying a debt of that kind for three weeks now, uncolumned, unspoken in any room that would count as keeping records, and it occurred to me only this morning what separates that man’s case from mine: his was heard. Mine has not once been said where anything could rule on it.

The Cormorant’s master asked me, before he had even cleared customs, what I would give him for a return cargo. I had an answer inside a minute. I have had three weeks for the other thing and no answer, and no Divan I could bring it to even if I decided I wanted one.